After much reviewing, debugging and asking other devs, in a nutshell this is the problem I was facing: The reducer and how it was being imported into a main "manifest" file to manage all other reducers.

Basically, since I was only using one reducer in this project, there was no need for a manifest reducer file. See below:

I don't know exactly why this was nesting state. Perhaps because, theoretically, we would be dealing with multiple reducers with different purposes (like a data reducer and a user reducer) and would need to nest those into our state tree to manage.

In short...be mindful of how your reducer is being imported into your createStore function and if it's the only reducer being used or if there's multiple reducers being run through a manifest file of sorts.